According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Canada has proposed new rules that would compel digital platforms to remove online content that features the sexual exploitation of children or intimate images without consent of the individuals involved. From a report: The rules were years in the making, and represent the third and possibly final installment of measures aimed at regulating digital platforms. Measures introduced since 2022 aim to increase the amount of domestic, Canadian-made content on streaming services, such as Netflix, and require digital platforms to help Canadian news-media outlets finance their newsroom operations. The legislation needs to be approved by Canada's Parliament before it takes effect.

Canada said its rules are based on concepts introduced by the European Union, the U.K. and Australia. Canadian officials say the proposed measures would apply to social-media platforms, adult-entertainment sites where users can upload content, and live-streaming services. These services, officials said, are expected to expeditiously remove two categories of content: That which sexually exploits a child or an abuse survivor, and intimate content broadcast without an individual's consent. The latter incorporates so-called revenge porn, or the nonconsensual posting or dissemination of intimate images, often after the end of a romantic relationship. Officials said private and encrypted messaging services are excluded from the proposed regulations.

Canadian officials said platforms will have a duty to either ensure the material is not published, or take it down once notified. Canada also intends to set up a new agency, the Digital Safety Commission, to enforce the rules, order harmful content taken down, and hold digital services accountable. Platforms that violate the rules could face a maximum penalty of up to 25 million Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $18.5 million, officials said.

Maker Roni Bandini developed a Raspberry Pi project to address his neighbors' loud reggaeton music by creating an AI-driven system that distorts audio on nearby Bluetooth speakers when reggaeton is detected. Tom's Hardware reports: Powering this Bluetooth jamming device is a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. It's connected to a DFRobot OLED display panel, which has a resolution of 128 x 32px. Audio is observed using a USB microphone, while a push button handles when the system will perform a check to listen for any potential reggaeton. According to Bandini, the Pi is running Raspberry Pi OS. The AI system driving the machine learning aspects of the design is Edge Impulse. With this, Bandini was able to train the Pi to listen for music and more specifically identify whether the song playing is classifiable as reggaeton or not. The official project page is available at Hackster.

During a briefing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Meghana Patwardhan, VP of Commercial Mobility at Dell Technology, told The Register that while the immediate future would consist of two worlds -- one with AI hardware and one without -- "every PC is going to be an AI PC in the longer term." From the report: In terms of new hardware, Dell used the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to show off new versions of its Surface-baiting Latitude 7350 convertible -- "the world's most serviceable commercial detachable," according to the company -- and its workstation-class Precision 3680 tower. Other devices in the Precision range include mobile workstations and the 3280 Compact Form Factor PC. Dell was also determined to present itself as a leader in hybrid working with the Premier Wireless ANC headset, replete with AI-based noise cancellation.

Duringt our talk, AI was never far from the lips of Dell's spokespeople as the company talked up the energy efficiency and future-proofing it saw in dedicated AI hardware, such as Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that are increasingly cropping up in CPUs. To illustrate the point, Dell boatsed about how much more efficient background blurring is on video calls when AI hardware is running compared to when it isn't. Hopefully, Microsoft will soon deliver a version of Windows capable of demonstrating a use for AI hardware that is more than hiding distractions in the background. Further reading: AI PCs To Account for Nearly 60% of All PC Shipments by 2027, IDC Says

Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google's antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday. From a report: In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple's Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing. "In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition," Google wrote in the filing.

The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009, following search efforts under the MSN and Windows Live brands. Today Bing has 3% global market share, according to StatCounter. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft generated $3.2 billion from search and news advertising, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion. Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing's quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.

The US Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments Monday in two cases that could dramatically reshape social media, weighing whether states such as Texas and Florida should have the power to control what posts platforms can remove from their services. From a report: The high-stakes battle gives the nation's highest court an enormous say in how millions of Americans get their news and information, as well as whether sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok should be able to make their own decisions about how to moderate spam, hate speech and election misinformation. At issue are laws passed by the two states that prohibit online platforms from removing or demoting user content that expresses viewpoints -- legislation both states say is necessary to prevent censorship of conservative users.

More than a dozen Republican attorneys general have argued to the court that social media should be treated like traditional utilities such as the landline telephone network. The tech industry, meanwhile, argues that social media companies have First Amendment rights to make editorial decisions about what to show. That makes them more akin to newspapers or cable companies, opponents of the states say. The case could lead to a significant rethinking of First Amendment principles, according to legal experts. A ruling in favor of the states could weaken or reverse decades of precedent against "compelled speech," which protects private individuals from government speech mandates, and have far-reaching consequences beyond social media. A defeat for social media companies seems unlikely, but it would instantly transform their business models, according to Blair Levin, an industry analyst at the market research firm New Street Research.

An anonymous reader shares a report from the ongoing Mobile World Congress trade show: This year's big scrum gatherer was Lenovo's long-rumored transparent laptop. It's real. It functions surprisingly well and -- nearest anyone can tell -- its existence is a testament to form over function. That's a perfectly fine thing to be when you're a concept device. When it comes to actually shipping a product, however, that's another conversation entirely. [...] Broadly speaking, it looks like a laptop, with a transparent pane where the screen should be. It's perhaps best understood as a kind of augmented reality device, in the sense that its graphics are overlaid on whatever happens to be behind it.

It's a crowd pleaser, with a futuristic air to it that embodies all manner of sci-fi tech tropes. The transparent display has become a kind of shorthand for future tech in stock art, and it's undeniably neat to see the thing in action. [...] The bottom of the device is covered in a large capacitive touch surface. This area serves as both a keyboard and a large stylus-compatible drawing surface. The flat surface can't compete with real, tactile keyboards, of course. Typing isn't the greatest experience here, as evidenced by previous dual-screen Lenovo laptops. But that's the tradeoff for the versatility of the virtual version.

The Washington Post reports: Google's self-driving car company, Waymo, is hitting resistance in its quest to expand 24/7 robotaxi service to other parts of California, including a series of incidents that have fed public officials' safety concerns about the vehicles coming to their cities. Over eight days in February, for example, a Waymo vehicle smashed into a closing gate while exiting the University of Southern California's campus; the next day, another collided with a cyclist in San Francisco. Later that week, a mob of people vandalized and lit one of its cars on fire. Days later, the company announced a voluntary recall of its software for an incident involving a pickup truck in Phoenix. [Though it occurred three months ago, the Post reports that after the initial contact between the vehicles, "A second Waymo vehicle made contact with the pickup truck a few minutes later."]

This string of events — none of which resulted in serious injuries — comes after Waymo's main competitor, General Motors-owned Cruise, recalled its fleet of driverless cars last year... [Waymo] is now the lone company trying to expand 24/7 robotaxi service around California, despite sharp resistance from local officials. "Waymo has become the standard-bearer for the entire robotaxi industry for better or for worse," said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. While Waymo's incidents are "nowhere near what Cruise is accused of doing, there is a crisis of confidence in autonomous vehicle companies related to safety right now."

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) delayed deciding whether Waymo could expand its service to include a portion of a major California highway and also Los Angeles and San Mateo counties, pending "further staff review," according to the regulator's website. While Waymo said the delay is a part of the commission's "standard and robust review process," the postponement comes as officials from other localities fear becoming like San Francisco — where self-driving cars have disrupted emergency scenes, held up traffic and frustrated residents who are learning to share public roads with robot cars... Zipper said it is a notable disparity that "the companies are saying the technology is supposed to be a godsend for urban life, and it's pretty striking that the leaders of these urban areas really don't want them," he said.
Waymo offers ride-hailing services in San Francisco and Phoenix — as well as some free rides in Los Angeles, according to the article. It also cites a December report from Waymo estimated that overich 7.1 million miles of testing, there were 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes "compared to if human drivers with the benchmark crash rate would have driven the same distance in the areas we operate."

From a report: A team of drone enthusiasts have built a sub-$500 drone that uses a camera and Google Maps to provide itself with GPS co-ordinates, removing the need for a GPS satellite signal. And all of this was done in 24 hours during the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon. The drone the trio opted for is a custom designed and 3D printed fixed wing featuring a large single motor towards the rear and a downward facing camera used for geo-referencing...

Doesn't Google Maps still require internet, you may ask? Google Maps allows users to download segments of maps ahead of time, usually for use when you are travelling or camping out in remote areas. In this instance, the team used this feature to their advantage, allowing the drone to continue operating...
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front.
From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted.

In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet.

Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers...

Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all.

This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

"One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his £40,000 car and drove away," reports the Observer. "Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals." [H]i-tech devices disguised as handheld games consoles are being traded online for thousands of pounds and are used by organised crime gangs to mimic the electronic key on an Ioniq 5, opening the doors and starting the engine. The device, known as an "emulator", works by intercepting a signal from the car, which is scanning for the presence of a legitimate key, and sending back a signal to gain access to the vehicle...

Hyundai says it is looking at measures to prevent the use of emulators "as a priority". But it is not the only carmaker whose vehicles appear to be vulnerable. An Observer investigation found that models by Toyota, Lexus and Kia have also been targeted... British motorists now face an increase in the number of thefts and rising insurance premiums... Car thefts are at their highest level for a decade in England and Wales, rising from 85,803 vehicles in the year to March 2012 to 130,270 in the year to March 2023 — an increase of more than 50%. Part of the reason, say experts, is the rise of keyless entry...

Kia did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Toyota, which owns Lexus, said: "Toyota and Lexus are continuously working on developing technical solutions to make vehicles more secure. Since introducing enhanced security hardware on the latest versions of a number of models, we have seen a significant drop-off in thefts. For older models we are currently developing solutions."
Another common attack requires entry to the vehicle first, according to the article, but then uses the vehicle's onboard diagnostic port to program "a new key linked to the vehicle..."

"Many owners of Ioniq 5s, which sell from around £42,000, now use steering locks to deter thieves."

On Wednesday Boeing "removed executive Ed Clark, the head of its 737 Max passenger jet program," reports CNN, "after a dramatic — and terrifying — midair blowout in January underscored ongoing problems with the jet." A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the four bolts that should have held the door plug in place were missing when the plane left Boeing's factory. The NTSB report did not assess blame for the missing bolts and the accident but in a statement to investors before the findings were released, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun assumed responsibility for the incident. "We caused the problem, and we understand that," he told investors during a call after reporting the latest quarterly loss at the company. "Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened."

Clark, who had been at Boeing for 18 years, had only been in charge of the Max program since March of 2021, assuming that title after the jets had been returned to service following the crashes. But he had previously held roles related to the 737 Max, including as chief engineer and chief 737 mechanic.

With the news of Clark's departure, Boeing also announced a shuffling of a number of executives in its Boeing Commercial Airplanes unit. It created a new executive position, Senior Vice President for BCA Quality, and named Elizabeth Lund to that position.

Florida lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday that forces social media companies to keep most minors off their platforms. The Hill reports: The legislation, which passed the state House Thursday after earlier being approved by the Senate, now heads to Gov. Ron DeSantis's (R) desk, though he says he's not quite ready to sign on. DeSantis told reporters Friday that he thinks there needs to be a "proper balance" between government regulations and parental input on the social media issue. "We'll be wrestling with that," he said. The governor said he'll be assessing the final version of the legislation likely through the weekend. "Federal law says 13 and under can't have social media accounts. That's not really enforced," he said.

The lawmakers who championed the proposed social media ban, which would require platforms check the ages of users through a third-party source, argue it will make the online landscape safer for youths. The legislation passed 108-7 in the state House and 23-14 in the Florida Senate within a matter of hours Thursday.

Google is shutting down the Google Pay app, as the standalone app has largely been replaced by Google Wallet. According to TechCrunch, Google Pay "will only be available in Singapore and India" after its shuts down in the United States. From the report: Users can continue to access the app's most popular features right from Google Wallet, which Google says is used five times more than the Google Pay app in the United States. After June 4, users will no longer be able to send, request or receive money through the U.S. version of the Google Pay app. Users have until that date to view and transfer their Google Pay balance to their bank account via the app. If you still have funds in your account after that date, you can view and transfer your funds to your bank from the Google Pay website.

Users who used the Google Pay app to find offers and deals can still so do using the new deals destination on Google Search, the company says. Google Wallet is the company's primary place for mobile payments in the United States, and will likely remain so. The app lets you use your phone to pay in stores, board a plane, ride transit, store loyalty cards, save driver's licenses and start your car via a digital key.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Beware the apes, Reddit told the world in its IPO documents, though not in such explicit terms. Put simply, the company warned potential investors that one of its subreddits, the infamous r/WallStreetBets, could make its stock price and volume extremely volatile -- and there's little Reddit can do about it. Reddit listed r/WallStreetBets as one of the possible risks to investing in the company in its S-1 form on Thursday, referencing the subreddit's role in the meme stock craze of 2021, where retail investors banded together to raise the price of struggling companies like GameStop and AMC. The goal of r/WallStreetBets back then was to screw over professional investors on Wall Street and make them lose money for betting against certain companies.

It's entirely possible that the everyday people on r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit of 15 million retail investors who refer to themselves as "apes" and "degenerates," and other online forums could do the same thing with Reddit's stock, the company stated. Reddit writes: "Given the broad awareness and brand recognition of Reddit, including as a result of the popularity of r/ wallstreetbets among retail investors, and the direct access by retail investors to broadly available trading platforms, the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could experience extreme volatility for reasons unrelated to our underlying business or macroeconomic or industry fundamentals."

The volatility could cause people to lose all or part of their investment, the company explained, if they are unable to sell their shares at or above the IPO price. The long-term effect of movements like those propelled by r/WallStreetBets is already documented, with the takeaway being that surges of interest and heavy investment don't necessarily bring success to companies over time.

Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers, but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments. From a report: Nearly a dozen engineers, hiring managers, and entrepreneurs who spoke with WIRED describe an environment in which technical job applicants are being put through the wringer. Take-home coding tests used to be rare, deployed only if an employer needed to be further convinced. Now interviewees are regularly given projects described as requiring just two to three hours that instead take days of work.

Live-coding exercises are also more intense, industry insiders say. One job seeker described an experience where an engineering manager said during an interview, "OK, we're going to build a To Do List app right now," a process that might normally take weeks.

Emails reviewed by WIRED showed that in one interview for an engineering role at Netflix, a technical recruiter requested that a job candidate submit a three-page project evaluation within 48 hours -- all before the first round of interviews. A Netflix spokesperson said the process is different for each role and otherwise declined to comment. A similar email at Snap outlined a six-part interview process for a potential engineering candidate, with each part lasting an hour. A company spokesperson says its interview process hasn't changed as a result of labor market changes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: News publishers are worried -- with good reason -- about changes coming to Google Search. AI-generated content replacing links on some of the most valuable space on the internet, in particular, has left media types with a lot of questions, starting with "is this going to be a traffic-destroying nightmare?" The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won't help publishers sleep any easier. Google confirmed some users were not seeing the News filter as part of ongoing testing. "We're testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them," a Google spokesperson confirmed via email.

Humane announced that its AI Pin would start shipping in March, but there's been a small delay. From a report: Early adopters are now being told orders will arrive in mid-April at the earliest, according to a video update from Humane staffer Sam Sheffer and emails we saw in Humane's official Discord channel. On the plus side, the company says it'll now throw in three months of its pricy $24-a-month subscription for free with the $699 pin -- and will do so for any other customers who buy one before March 31st, too.

In its fourth quarter earnings statement on Thursday, Mercedes-Benz said it is backing off its plan to only sell electric vehicles after 2030. Instead, the company said it "only expects 50 percent of its sales to be all-electric -- a significant drop from the once rosier outlook," reports The Verge. "Gas and hybrid vehicles will remain a part of the company's future for years to come." From the report: "Customers and market conditions will set the pace of the transformation," Mercedes said in its report. "The company plans to be in a position to cater to different customer needs, whether it's an all-electric drivetrain or an electrified combustion engine, until well into the 2030s."

Not even in Europe, where EV sales growth outpaces North America's, does Mercedes expect to transition to EV-only sales anytime soon, the company's CEO Ola Kallenius told Reuters. "It's not going to be 100% in 2030, obviously... from the whole European market, but probably from the Mercedes side as well," he said. In 2021, Mercedes was a lot more bullish about plug-in powertrains, saying that by 2030 it would only sell EVs and completely phase out gas-powered vehicles.

Reddit has filed its initial public offering (IPO) with the SEC on Thursday. "The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol 'RDDT,'" reports CNBC. From the report: Its market debut, expected in March, will be the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It's the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019. Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing. The social networking company's core business is reliant on online advertising sales stemming from its website and mobile app.

The company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared with a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior. [...] Reddit said it plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its ad business and that it expects to open new revenue channels by offering tools and incentives to "drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce." It's also in the early stages of developing and monetizing a data-licensing business in which third parties would be allowed to access and search data on its platform.

For example, Google on Thursday announced an expanded partnership with Reddit that will give the search giant access to the company's data to, among other uses, train its AI models. "In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years," Reddit said, regarding its data-licensing business. "We expect a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter." On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.

Longtime Slashdot reader Rei writes: In a blog post today, Bluesky, the social media network founded by Jay Graber, announced that they have finally opened to federation. Users can now operate their own PDS (backend) servers. How to do so is discussed on the developers' blog and a new Discord channel for PDS administrators.

As the blog notes, there are key differences between the AT Protocol/Bluesky federation and ActivityPub/Mastodon federation, including: global conversation (rather than local-server based with remote content only brought in from follows); a decentralized user account not bound to a specific host; user-composable moderation lists not inherently tied to a specific server, offsetting the need for defederation; user-composable feeds/algorithms, not tied to servers; and full account portability, without the need to be initiated by your server, protecting users from rogue admins or servers that disappear.

Despite the difference, a number of projects, such as Bridgy-Fed, plan to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon together, with all of Bluesky appearing as a single Mastodon server on ActivityPub, and Mastodon users being translated to a decentralized identifier (DID) for AT Protocol (atproto) calls.